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What an unmitigated disaster. Anyone who has been following the MV3 transition saw this coming from a mile away. When I wrote the MV3 chapter for "Building Brow

What an unmitigated disaster. Anyone who has been following the MV3 transition saw this coming from a mile away. When I wrote the MV3 chapter for "Building Browser Extensions", it was nearly impossible to commit to any content because there was so little clarity or direction. I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill, but given the state of things, who has any confidence in what the future of browser extensions holds?

eight_ender 4y ago
I wont mention what company, but where I work we've spent about 6 months now with an entire dev team hammering their heads against a wall trying to port our extension to MV3, because the alternative was to lose it entirely at the deadline. Hacks, workarounds, bad docs, and lately, Google pops up to tell us OSD is kinda sorta a thing you can use, but clearly it's at a basically alpha level of maturity. This latest announcement might seem like a reprieve, but it's even worse than before for us, because now it's clear that OSD is a temporary measure, and now we have promises to fix the actual issues in the future. As a manager I have no idea how to proceed. Do we solider ahead with OSD like we planned? Wait for them to fix the core issues? We have so little trust in Google fixing things, and a great deal of confidence in them making things worse at this point. If we commit to OSD we might be looking at doing the same level of work again, when they fix the core issues and deprecate it. If we wait for core fixes, we might not get the work done before a nebulous future deadline that could drop on us at any moment. Google has caused us to burn an absolutely incredible amount of time and money with this. Believe me, we're are footing the bill, and have been for some time now.
dmitriid 4y ago
> I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill They will try again in a year, and there will be less opposition (because people get tired of fighting etc.), and this will happen
- akiselev 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter. The only people who take Google seriously now are the people who took IBM seriously yesterday. Google isn’t the CIA or NSA. They don’t have that kind of staying power because they don’t have any guiding principle beyond profit (for better or for worse).
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    What a weird thing to say. Google dominates search, browsers, and mobile operating systems. CIA and NSA inly wished they had this (well, thanks to CLOUD Act they do, through Google and others). People not taking Google seriously is precisely why all this shit like Manifest V3 is happening.
    - Fatnino 4y ago
      Chrome without ad blocking will quickly drop from the top spot. As for search: Google has been watering down search for years trying to make it "understand" human speech. This has been a failure and not ChatGPT exists that can actually (apparently) understand english and replies in English too. It's an excellent first pass to get me the information I'm after. The responses from ChatGPT leapfrog me over the first 4-5 rounds of Google searches and right to the point where simple 1-2 word searches on google/bing can get me across the finish line.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vinibrito 4y ago
      I think that the viewpoint is that no dominator lasts forever. Not so weird then. I think that we had two or three browsers be the dominator already and then going away.
dessant 4y ago
It was inevitable to delay the rollout, the adoption of Manifest V3 is way too low among the most popular extensions. Take a look at the various featured categories on the Chrome Web Store, only a small fraction of featured extensions have migrated to Manifest V3. In 3 weeks all of them would have had to be removed from those promotion pages and the Chrome Web Store would have been in ruins. The deprecation timeline is too aggressive considering that Manifest V3 is still missing important features, so many developers have decided to brace for impact, even if it meant losing the Featured badge for their extensions in January 2023.
- cj 4y ago
  > The deprecation timeline is too aggressive I’ve seen Google deprecate a dozen products I’ve used. They all follow the same pattern: 1) Deprecation announced with shut down date 2) 1-2 months before the day, they’ll send an email saying the shut down is delayed by 3-12 months 3) Repeat steps 1-2 until enough people have migrated away The same thing will happen with Google Analytics, scheduled to be disabled July 2023. There’s no way Google will turn off millions of Analytics (GA3) accounts in 6 months when their replacement product (GA4) is so inferior.
  - flatiron 4y ago
    I was a really big stadia fan. Controller and dozens of games. Hundreds of hours in game. Everyone said it was going to shit down and I did believe them but said no way they would leave us hanging. Got every penny back from them. So at least with stadia the few that believed in them made out with free gaming over the last years (and a free useless controller)
runlevel1 4y ago
I just wrote a quick script to survey extensions featured on the Chrome Web Store. Of the 1200 checked so far: Manifest v2: 872 Manifest v3: 328 They'd basically be breaking almost 2/3 of extensions. EDIT: Just noticed 9 out of 12 of Google's own extensions are still on manifest v2 as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_chrome_extensions?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_ch...
- tech234a 4y ago
  Note that Google's collection doesn't seem to include all of their extensions. For example, they are missing Google Voice, Google Dictionary, Send from Gmail, Page Analytics, Google Tone, Chrome Web Store Launcher, RSS Subscription Extension, Google Scholar Button, IBA Opt-out, Google Mail Checker, Google Similar Pages, Endpoint Verification, Chrome Remote Desktop, Chromebook Recovery Utility, Certificate Enrollment for Chrome OS, Screen Reader, Print, Google Docs Offline, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Google extensions that I missed in my search. Some of them have been abandoned for a number of years. Also, this site [1] has been tracking Manifest V3 migration, but I think they might be incorrectly including Apps and Themes in their counts (I believe the 180K figure represents all of the items on the store [2]) which might be throwing off the numbers a bit. [1]: https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration [2]: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Back in my day attaching Google’s name to a product was a positive development. Remember GMail? “Unmitigated shitshow” is the only thing that comes to mind today. What tech giveth, tech taketh away.
    - szundi 4y ago
      This is so true. They even closed down their IoT core for pennies. Google = unreliable as business partners and more shitty every day anyway.

eight_ender 4y ago

I wont mention what company, but where I work we've spent about 6 months now with an entire dev team hammering their heads against a wall trying to port our extension to MV3, because the alternative was to lose it entirely at the deadline. Hacks, workarounds, bad docs, and lately, Google pops up to tell us OSD is kinda sorta a thing you can use, but clearly it's at a basically alpha level of maturity. This latest announcement might seem like a reprieve, but it's even worse than before for us, because now it's clear that OSD is a temporary measure, and now we have promises to fix the actual issues in the future. As a manager I have no idea how to proceed. Do we solider ahead with OSD like we planned? Wait for them to fix the core issues? We have so little trust in Google fixing things, and a great deal of confidence in them making things worse at this point. If we commit to OSD we might be looking at doing the same level of work again, when they fix the core issues and deprecate it. If we wait for core fixes, we might not get the work done before a nebulous future deadline that could drop on us at any moment. Google has caused us to burn an absolutely incredible amount of time and money with this. Believe me, we're are footing the bill, and have been for some time now.

dmitriid 4y ago

> I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill They will try again in a year, and there will be less opposition (because people get tired of fighting etc.), and this will happen

akiselev 4y ago
Doesn’t matter. The only people who take Google seriously now are the people who took IBM seriously yesterday. Google isn’t the CIA or NSA. They don’t have that kind of staying power because they don’t have any guiding principle beyond profit (for better or for worse).
- dmitriid 4y ago
  What a weird thing to say. Google dominates search, browsers, and mobile operating systems. CIA and NSA inly wished they had this (well, thanks to CLOUD Act they do, through Google and others). People not taking Google seriously is precisely why all this shit like Manifest V3 is happening.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Chrome without ad blocking will quickly drop from the top spot. As for search: Google has been watering down search for years trying to make it "understand" human speech. This has been a failure and not ChatGPT exists that can actually (apparently) understand english and replies in English too. It's an excellent first pass to get me the information I'm after. The responses from ChatGPT leapfrog me over the first 4-5 rounds of Google searches and right to the point where simple 1-2 word searches on google/bing can get me across the finish line.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vinibrito 4y ago
    I think that the viewpoint is that no dominator lasts forever. Not so weird then. I think that we had two or three browsers be the dominator already and then going away.

dessant 4y ago

It was inevitable to delay the rollout, the adoption of Manifest V3 is way too low among the most popular extensions. Take a look at the various featured categories on the Chrome Web Store, only a small fraction of featured extensions have migrated to Manifest V3. In 3 weeks all of them would have had to be removed from those promotion pages and the Chrome Web Store would have been in ruins. The deprecation timeline is too aggressive considering that Manifest V3 is still missing important features, so many developers have decided to brace for impact, even if it meant losing the Featured badge for their extensions in January 2023.

cj 4y ago
> The deprecation timeline is too aggressive I’ve seen Google deprecate a dozen products I’ve used. They all follow the same pattern: 1) Deprecation announced with shut down date 2) 1-2 months before the day, they’ll send an email saying the shut down is delayed by 3-12 months 3) Repeat steps 1-2 until enough people have migrated away The same thing will happen with Google Analytics, scheduled to be disabled July 2023. There’s no way Google will turn off millions of Analytics (GA3) accounts in 6 months when their replacement product (GA4) is so inferior.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I was a really big stadia fan. Controller and dozens of games. Hundreds of hours in game. Everyone said it was going to shit down and I did believe them but said no way they would leave us hanging. Got every penny back from them. So at least with stadia the few that believed in them made out with free gaming over the last years (and a free useless controller)

runlevel1 4y ago

I just wrote a quick script to survey extensions featured on the Chrome Web Store. Of the 1200 checked so far: Manifest v2: 872 Manifest v3: 328 They'd basically be breaking almost 2/3 of extensions. EDIT: Just noticed 9 out of 12 of Google's own extensions are still on manifest v2 as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_chrome_extensions?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_ch...

tech234a 4y ago
Note that Google's collection doesn't seem to include all of their extensions. For example, they are missing Google Voice, Google Dictionary, Send from Gmail, Page Analytics, Google Tone, Chrome Web Store Launcher, RSS Subscription Extension, Google Scholar Button, IBA Opt-out, Google Mail Checker, Google Similar Pages, Endpoint Verification, Chrome Remote Desktop, Chromebook Recovery Utility, Certificate Enrollment for Chrome OS, Screen Reader, Print, Google Docs Offline, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Google extensions that I missed in my search. Some of them have been abandoned for a number of years. Also, this site [1] has been tracking Manifest V3 migration, but I think they might be incorrectly including Apps and Themes in their counts (I believe the 180K figure represents all of the items on the store [2]) which might be throwing off the numbers a bit. [1]: https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration [2]: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions
- akiselev 4y ago
  Back in my day attaching Google’s name to a product was a positive development. Remember GMail? “Unmitigated shitshow” is the only thing that comes to mind today. What tech giveth, tech taketh away.
  - szundi 4y ago
    This is so true. They even closed down their IoT core for pennies. Google = unreliable as business partners and more shitty every day anyway.